Rachel Weisz Trivia: 60 intriguing facts about the actress!

Rachel Weisz is an English actress and model. She holds both British and American citizenship.

Let’s see some interesting facts about her!

1. Rachel Hannah Weisz was born 7 March 1970 in Westminster, London, and grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

2. Her father, George Weisz, is a mechanical engineer/inventor from Hungary.

3. Her mother, Edith Ruth, was a teacher-turned-psychotherapist from Vienna, Austria.

4. Her parents left for the United Kingdom around 1938, before the outbreak of the Second World War, to escape the Nazis.

5. Scholar Rev. James Parkes helped her mother and her mother’s family leave Austria for England in 1939.

6. Her father is from a Jewish family; her maternal grandfather, Alexander Teich, was also Jewish, and had been a secretary of the World Union of Jewish Students.

7. Her mother’s ancestry is Austrian Jewish, Viennese and Italian.

8. Weisz’s mother formally converted to Judaism when marrying Weisz’s father.

9. She has a younger sister, Minnie Weisz, who is a photographic artist.

10. Weisz’s parents valued the arts and encouraged their children to form opinions of their own by introducing them to family debates.

11. Weisz left North London Collegiate School and attended Benenden School for one year, completing A-levels at St Paul’s Girls School.

12. Known for being an “English rose”, Weisz started modelling when she was 14.

13. In 1984, she gained public attention when she turned down an offer to star in King David with Richard Gere.

14. After leaving school, she entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where she graduated with a second-class honours, upper division (2:1) Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

15. During her university years, where she was a contemporary of Sacha Baron Cohen, Alexander Armstrong, Sue Perkins, Mel Giedroyc, Richard Osman, and Ben Miller (whom she briefly dated), she appeared in various student productions, co-founding a student drama group called Cambridge Talking Tongues.

16. It won a Guardian Student Drama Award at the 1991 Edinburgh Festival Fringe for an improvised piece called Slight Possession, directed by David Farr. The group existed until 1993.

17. At 1991’s Edinburgh Festival, she won a student drama award for a play – Slight Possession, which she wrote and acted.

18. She was awarded the 1994 London Critics Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre) for Most Promising Newcomer for her performance in Design for Living, for her breakthrough role as Gilda in Sean Mathias’s revival of Noël Coward’s “Design for Living.”

19. She first appeared in the 1992 television film “Advocates II,” in a minor role.

20. Later, she went on to star in the “Inspector Morse” episode “Twilight of the Gods,” “Scarlet and Black,” and “Dirty Something” alongside Paul Reynolds.

21. She started her career with a minor role in the 1994 film “Death Machine.”

22. Rachel Weisz leaves the ‘Youth’ Premiere during the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2015 in Cannes, France.

23. Her first major role was in the movie “Chain Reaction,” as Dr. Lily Sinclair alongside Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman.

24. The movie received mostly negative reviews with a 16% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle felt the film was one of the summer’s best movies of the year.

25. She got her name “English Rose,” in the year 1996, after her role as Miranda Fox in the movie “Stealing Beauty,” directed by the Italian Academy Award-winner Bernardo Bertolucci.

26.Her breakthrough role was in the 1999 adventure film “The Mummy,” as English Egyptologist Evelyn Carnahan, opposite Brendan Fraser.

27. Originally, her character was meant to be Evelyn Carnarvon. She and her brother were to be the children of the “cursed” Lord Carnarvon.

28. She was casted in the movie as Stephen Sommer was impressed with her performance in the 1998 movie “The Land Girls.”

29. In a scene, where Weisz is covered with rats and locusts, real animals were used, though there were many computer generated scenes in the movie.

30. She was nominated for Saturn Awards for Best Actress and Blockbuster Entertainment Awards for Favorite Actress – Action.

31. In 2001, she returned her role in the sequel “The Mummy Returns,” which grossed an estimated $433 million worldwide.

32. She played a dual role of Evelyn Carnahan O’Connell as well as Princess Nefertiri in the sequel.

33. She received a nomination for Best British Actress from Empire Awards, for her performance in the movie.

34. She was cast as Angela Dodson in the movie “Constantine,” alongside Keanu Reeves. The movie was based on the comic book, “Hellblazer.”

35. Film Threat called her portrayal in the movie as “effective at projecting scepticism and, eventually, dawning horror.”

36. A life-size replica of Rachel Weisz was made and used as the corpse of Angela Dodson’s twin sister Isabel who committed suicide.

37. Her next role as an activist Tessa Quayle in the movie “The Constant Gardener,” earned her a number of awards including an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

38. The role was actually based on the famous social activist and charity worker Yvette Pierpaoli, who was killed in a truck crash in Albania, in the year 1999.

39. The scene in which she walks through a sum and children ask her “How are you?” was unscripted. The children are not extras and they will in Kibera.

40. She beat Eva Green, Kate Winslet, Sienna Miller, Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman for the role.

41. Weisz starred in the film The Whistleblower, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010.

42. That same year, she guest-starred in the animated series The Simpsons, in the 22nd season episode “How Munched is That Birdie in the Window?”.[

43. Weisz’s 2011 roles included an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea, Fernando Meirelles’ psychosexual drama 360[77] opposite Jude Law again and Anthony Hopkins, the BBC espionage thriller Page Eight, and the thriller film Dream House, alongside Daniel Craig.

44. She filmed scenes for To the Wonder, a 2012 romantic drama film written and directed by Terrence Malick, alongside Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Javier Bardem and Rachel McAdams; her scenes were cut.

45. She has also starred in the 2012 action thriller film The Bourne Legacy based on the series of books by Robert Ludlum.

46. Weisz portrayed Evanora, in Oz the Great and Powerful, which opened on 7 March 2013.

47. In 2015, she appeared in drama film Youth and in science fiction film The Lobster. The film won Cannes Jury Prize.

48. She appeared in the 2016 drama film The Light Between Oceans with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander.

49. She will appear in an upcoming British biographical drama film about sailor Donald Crowhurst, The Mercy, which is being directed by James Marsh.

50. She will be starring alongside Zac Efron, Jesse McCartney, Hailee Steinfeld, Zooey Deschanel, Sofia Carson, Laura Marano and Emmy Rossum in Uncoded.

51. In the summer of 2001, Weisz began dating American filmmaker and producer Darren Aronofsky. They met backstage at London’s Almeida Theatre, where she was starring in The Shape of Things.

52. Weisz moved to New York with Aronofsky the following year. In 2005, they were engaged. Their son, Henry Chance Aronofsky, was born in 2006 in New York City.

53. The couple resided in the East Village in Manhattan.

54. In November 2010, Weisz and Aronofsky announced that they had been apart for months, but remain close friends and are committed to bringing up their son together in New York.

55. Weisz began dating English actor Daniel Craig in December 2010 and they married on 22 June 2011 in a private New York ceremony, with only four guests in attendance, including Weisz’s son and Craig’s daughter.

56. Weisz, a British citizen by birth, became a naturalised American citizen in 2011.

57. In 2009, Weisz expressed her views on Botox to Harper’s Bazaar – “It should be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen. Acting is all about expression; why would you want to iron out a frown?”

58. During her career, she has been featured on the covers of magazines such as insideKENT, Vogue and Esquire.

59. She serves as a muse to fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez, and was named L’Oréal’s global ambassador in 2010.

60. On July 7, 2007, Weisz presented at the American leg of Live Earth, along with Alec Baldwin and Kevin Bacon.